With Spotify launching a new offline music player for iPhones, it has taken a big step forward to giving itself a future. Now it faces the same dilemma as Real’s Rhapsody: why pay for a universal jukebox when your music will disappear when the sub runs out?Spotify, DRM and the celestial jukebox • The Register

As you may be aware, there are a number of other tracks which we know (from various sources) were also recorded during this period of the band. We identified a number of these to Island - “I Came Back Here To Meet You”, “TV Orphan”, “I Won’t Play Your Game”, “Do the Mutation”, “Dark Love”, “The Day the World Ended”, “The Riff”, “Radio Beach”, “Storms of Things”, “You Were Someone Else Then”, “The Joker”, “Car Crash Flashback” and “City Doesn’t Care”.List of rare early Ultravox tracks (Ultravox.org.uk)

Perhaps the best reason to care is Samantha Morton, whose magnetic performance is all suggestion: She isn’t given much dialogue, so we have to read in her face the slow thawing as she finally comes to terms with her boyfriend’s death.The New Cult Canon: Morvern Callar | Film | A.V. Club

Will the new paid-for online model inform and educate on hard issues - financial matters, but also medicine, the environment, education and so on - that matter to us, or will it concentrate on the more sensationalist and titillating bangs for the buck? And even if paid-for online services do endeavour to fill the gap created by the death of financial paternalism, will millions on low incomes be excluded from access to this information? Should we be relaxed if ‘can’t pay’ means ‘can’t know’?

There is a debate here about two kinds of fairness. There is the fairness of ensuring a level playing field for players in a commercial market. And there is the fairness of the distribution of information and knowledge to all who need it, irrespective of their material circumstances. These are two different kinds of fairness. They are apples and pears of social justice.BBC - Peston’s Picks: What future for media and journalism?

The curse of the Battersea power station has struck again. The future of the imposing but derelict building, one of the most recognisable landmarks in London, is again in doubt after it emerged that the Irish property company that owns the site is struggling for survival.

Real Estate Opportunities, which bought the former power station in 2006, lost £200m in the first six months of the year and is labouring under debts of £1.6bn, hit by the disastrous state of the Irish property market. Its auditors warned that there are “material uncertainties” about the business as a going concern. Battersea power station owner in debt crisis | Business | guardian.co.uk

We Are Hunted monitors the mainstream press, blogs, Twitter, MySpace, YouTube, Last.fm, iLike, BitTorrent, LimeWire and more to create a chart for each of these sources. It then shakes, rinses and repeats with its own analysis to create the overall chart. This analysis includes sentiment detection to work out whether people like or dislike a track, semantic analysis to understand who people are talking about, clustering and classification to group related artists, and network analysis to uncover the connections between artists and the people who write about them. Strewth!

The result is a playlist that’s constantly updated. The We Are Hunted playlist (Spotify link) updates every ten minutes, even faster than its own Web site, which requires human monitoring to add images for each artist.

Each takes around 60 hours, over four months. First, you temper your bamboo pole – only the very finest Tonkin cane from China, straight, unblemished and with the knots at least a foot apart – over a soft flame, driving out the moisture and stabilising the wood bamboo is, Barder says, “like nature’s fibreglass – strong, dense longitudinal fibres in a natural resin” but without scorching or weakening it. Then you carefully split it into between 12 and 24 strips, using a knife and mallet. After that, you file and sand both sides of each knot. Next, you reheat the wood in the flame, temporarily softening it so you can set it perfectly straight in a vice. How to make a split-cane fishing rod | Money | The Guardian

If you upgraded a Jailbroken iPhone to 3.0 and are missing icons for apps you put in categories then go to SETTING then GENERAL then RESTRICTIONS enable the restrictions and then disable the restrictions and that should bring back your icons for your apps!How to get your app icons back after upgrading iPhone firmware.

The world’s highest ski resort, Chacaltaya, 17,400 feet up in the Bolivian Andes, has melted. Over the last two decades, the glacier on which the resort was built shrunk by more than 80 percent—so much so that the 60-year-old main lodge is now stranded atop a rocky ridge and the only run left is a 600-foot schuss. The World’s Highest Ski Resort Has Melted (nat geo)

Their tragic ordeal was immortalized in Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s The Worst Journey in the World (ranked our #1 favorite adventure book of all time): In 1911 three Brits slogged 130 miles across Antarctica’s Ross Island in the pitch-black, blow-high-hell dead of the polar winter. And all for the unlikely prize of three emperor penguin eggs.

And now the story—this time from expedition leader Edward A. Wilson’s original 40-page handwritten journal with watercolor illustrations (above)—can be yours for a mere £100,000. Bonhams in London will auction the forgotten treasure in mid-September.
“Worst Journey in the World”original journal for sale